As inmates age, a prison carpenter builds more coffins

By Gary Fields, The Wall Street Journal, May 18, 2005

TUNICA, La. -- At the Angola state penitentiary here, Richard Leggett, a
yellow pencil tucked behind his right ear, put the molding on his latest
creation: a 7-foot coffin. He worked with some urgency, sewing and stapling
the white bedding inside. He always likes to keep three coffins in stock, so
he doesn't run out.

Half a mile away, one of his other hand-made caskets -- birch and pine,
stained a rich brown hue -- was being laid into the ground at the prison
cemetery. It held the body of a 57-year-old fellow inmate, imprisoned since
the 1970s for killing a 13-year-old girl.

As the prison's coffin maker, Mr. Leggett, 53 years old, has been busy. The
prison has needed one or two of his caskets in each of the last five weeks.
At Angola, 97 percent of inmates now die in prison, up from about 80 percent
a decade ago. "I'll probably end up making my own," he says.

The rise of lengthy, mandatory sentences and a nationwide tough-on-crime
attitude has resulted in a booming prison population -- 2.1 million last
June, compared with 501,886 in 1980 -- and an aging one. The number of
inmates dying from natural causes rose to 2,700 in 2002 from 799 in 1982,
according to the U.S. Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Inmates often arrive at prison in the physical condition of someone 10
years to 15 years older because of the lack of health care they received
while free, according to the American Correctional Association, a group of
corrections officials. Chronic illnesses such as HIV, hepatitis and asthma
are prevalent among prisoners, as are histories of alcohol and drug abuse,
making them more likely to die earlier than normal.

Texas, which had 43 burials in 1975, is burying about 100 prisoners a year
now, at a cost of $1,500 each. Oregon has contracted with local funeral
homes to cremate unclaimed deceased inmates and store the ashes. The cost is
about $432 per cremation.

At Angola, funerals are elaborate affairs, with hand-made coffins pulled to
graves by horse-drawn carriages, in rites conducted almost entirely by
inmates. Warden Burl Cain believes such services are a stabilizing
influence, keeping inmates busy and offering purpose to those who have no
hope of leaving alive. "A man wants to be productive, even the ones here,"
he says.

Once known as the bloodiest prison in America, inmates at Angola used to
fashion weapons from innocuous items -- such as toothbrushes and towels --
to maim and kill. A murder a month was considered normal. Today, though, it
isn't the Angola of "Dead Man Walking" and "Monster's Ball," two movies
filmed here. Now, it's an older Angola, and death often comes from natural
causes.

Last year, 29 inmates at Angola died of natural causes, up from six in
1984, even though the population has stayed the same at about 5,100. This
year, 23 have died already, none from inmate-on-inmate violence. The prison
lost its oldest inmate earlier this year, a 95-year-old, who had been in and
out of prison since Harry Truman was president.

During the last decade, there have been only four prison murders at Angola.
Some inmates attribute that to what they call "criminal menopause" --
meaning when they hit a certain age, their violent natures dissipate. They
also credit the warden, a former teacher who says he came to corrections
because high-school students were too unruly.

To deal with its aging population, over 500 inmates at Angola have been
trained to perform CPR and there is a hospice here for those who are in the
final stages of terminal illnesses. And Warden Cain has created a funeral
industry, of which Mr. Leggett's coffin-making is a primary piece. Other
inmates make shrouds for the caskets and plan services.

Angola gets society's most serious offenders -- child molesters, murderers
and rapists. Two years ago, the prison stopped accepting anyone with a
sentence of less than 50 years, meaning few will ever leave.

"A couple of decades after I got here, people actually got out. We used to
have call-out every workday where three or four would be called out; they
were going home," says Douglas Dennis, 69, who arrived here in 1957 and is
serving a double life sentence for killing two prisoners in fights. He is
now a writer for the Angolite, an award-winning prison publication whose
death listings are scoured by the inmates. Now, "they might as well have
welded the doors shut."

About half of those of who die at Angola are buried on the prison's grounds
because inmates have lost touch with their families and have no one to
collect the remains. "Even your bones don't get a second chance to get out,"
says Mr. Dennis, the prison's unofficial historian.

The Mississippi River forms three of the institution's four borders and the
Tunica Hills, an area of snakes, trees and wild animals, is the fourth.
Established as a prison in 1880, Angola gets its name from the plantation
that preceded it, which in turn was named for the area of Africa where most
of its slaves had come from. Except for the occasional vehicle, there is no
mechanical noise. During the day, groups of inmates carrying hoes, shovels
and sling blades head to fields where they grow four million pounds of
produce, ranging from corn to wheat, each year.

At night, only lights from the various cell blocks on the 18,000-acre
compound dot the darkness. The prison grounds are larger than the island of
Manhattan.

When there are violent incidents and attempted escapes, they are dealt with
swiftly. Offenders are put into Cellblock J, where they remain in 6-by-8
cells, 23 hours a day, for a minimum of six months. They aren't allowed to
make telephone calls, smoke or have visitors.

At Angola, "life means life," says Mr. Cain, 62, the short, white-haired
warden, who occasionally rides his Harley-Davidson down the 20-mile asphalt
highway that dead-ends at the prison's gates. He has mixed feelings about
his elderly inmates. "Prison shouldn't be a place for dying old men," he
says. "It should be a place for predators."

For years, inmates were buried in flimsy coffins that resembled shipping
crates, each costing anywhere from $650 to $900. In June 1995, the prison
was preparing to bury Joseph Siegel, a 69-year-old prisoner who had been
convicted in 1971 for burglary and murdering a state senator.

As the inmates lifted Mr. Siegel's coffin to lay into the freshly dug
grave, his body fell through the bottom of the casket. They carefully laid
the coffin over the body and started to shovel dirt over the coffin. The lid
then caved in.

Warden Cain, then only in his first year on the job, was disgusted. "Once a
man dies, his sentence is complete and there should be dignity in the
passing," he says.

He asked some inmates, including Eugene Redwine, who had committed the
murder with Mr. Siegel and was known for his carpentry skills, whether they
could build a coffin. The inmates agreed, making a coffin in two weeks at a
cost of $250, considerably less than the prison had been paying -- and a
much higher quality.

Mr. Leggett, now the principal coffin maker here, has been to only one
funeral in his 34 years at Angola. It was after the March 2003 death of his
mentor and predecessor, Mr. Redwine.

He sat on the front row in the chapel inside the hospice, the area reserved
for family. There was no one else there for the 74-year-old man. Mr. Leggett
says his mentor taught him the importance of doing his job well. "He said,
'Give it your best effort. If you're going to do something, give it your
best.' He instilled that in me."

The two met after Mr. Leggett, who came to prison as a teenager, had been
inside a two-man cell for six years. Mr. Redwine, nearly twice Mr. Leggett's
age, started teaching the younger inmate about carpentry. Mr. Leggett took
to it and began reading everything he could. The two became skilled
carpenters, making furniture, rocking chairs, and toys, most of which went
to the staff.

Now there's little that Mr. Leggett can't make. All he needs is a picture
or a drawing. Cabinets, dressers, and potato bins are all in his repertoire.
Most items are used at the prison, and a few are sold. He earns the prison's
top wage -- 20 cents an hour -- giving him some spending money for
incidentals. He enjoys admiring his finished products, especially the
coffins. "If you'd seen what they were buried in before, you'd understand,"
he says.

Nicknamed "Grasshopper" in his early days here because he was skinny with
long limbs, he killed a man and a woman on May 29, 1971, near Amite, La., as
he robbed their store. When asked how he remembers the exact date, he spits
tobacco juice on the ground, and replies: "Why would I remember it? That's
something that weighs on your mind. I have a lot of regrets."

Today, Mr. Leggett is a heavyset man with thick glasses, a bad heart valve
and diabetes. Because he's an inmate trustee -- which means he's a low risk
for behavior violations -- he isn't under constant guard and lives with the
other trustees in a cellblock reserved for them.

A loner, Mr. Leggett spends most of his time in the carpentry shop, working
with two assistants, meticulously going over every detail. "You never can
tell," he says, standing near one of the oblong boxes, "when one of them is
going to be yours." Mr. Leggett has lost touch with most of his relatives
and the one he can locate, his son, is serving 20 years in prison in Texas.
"I can't go see him and he can't come see me," he says.

It takes him a week to produce a coffin, although he once built one on
special order for an oversized inmate in two days. He worked 36 hours
straight trying to meet the state requirement that inmates who die of
natural causes be buried quickly because they're not embalmed. His most
difficult job, he says, was building a tiny 2-foot casket at the request of
a prison employee whose child was stillborn. "The child didn't have a chance
to live," he says.

This month, Mr. Leggett had to increase his work schedule. Two inmates died
and another committed suicide in a five-day period. All were to be buried at
the prison cemetery, cleaning out his entire stock of caskets.

For the funeral of Rick Schweickhardt, the man who killed the 13-year-old
girl, inmates gathered at a prison park. They followed the prison's hearse
-- a black, horse-drawn carriage built by inmates in 1998 to resemble
hearses used in the 1800s. Diamond and Laddie, a pair of white, 2,200-pound
Percheron horses, descendants of the warden's own champion Percheron, pulled
the carriage onto the road to the cemetery, with a little urging from
coachman Lloyd "Bones" Bone.

Mr. Bone, a gaunt, unsmiling man with hollow cheeks, has been here since
1971 when he stabbed a man during a knife fight in Algiers, one of the
toughest sections of New Orleans. The loser died; the winner got life at
Angola.

A few years ago, Warden Cain asked Mr. Bone, who helped tend the horses at
the prison stable, to drive the hearse. The job stuck. The warden bought him
a tuxedo and a top hat and nicknamed him "Dr. Death." Sitting
ramrod-straight atop the hearse, Mr. Bone says he never looks back at the
carriage, but adds, "I never forget what I'm carrying." At 64, he frequently
thinks about what his own ride will be like: "Who's going to drive the
hearse when my time comes?"

Mr. Schweickhardt had no family at the funeral service. His mother died a
month before he did and no one came to claim him. Four dozen inmates who
knew the deceased walked behind the hearse to Point Lookout II, the prison
cemetery opened in 1996.

There have been 97 funerals here in nine years. Its predecessor, Point
Lookout I, a short distance away, has 332 marked graves and an unknown
number of unmarked ones. Officials stopped using it when, as they began
digging a new grave, they discovered human bones were already there.

Since April, funerals have been so frequent that the ground hasn't settled
enough on 10 graves to add the simple white crosses used to mark burial
plots.

Their voices melodious and clear in the steamy sunshine, the inmates sang
"Amazing Grace," with the clomping of the horses' hooves as their only
accompaniment. All of them had been at Angola at least 10 years, most for
much longer.

Every detail of the service, from the meticulously hand-dug grave, to the
braiding of the horses' tails, was done by the inmates. With an extension
program from the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, there are ample
inmate ministers to conduct the funeral. They quoted scriptures and sang
hymns without Bibles or notes. At the cemetery, three inmates asked an
assistant warden if they could request that their families bury them here
one day.

One by one, the inmates walked to the casket, touched it and looked at the
picture of Mr. Schweickhardt on top. At the grave site, the inmates sang a
cappella: "I'm free. Praise the Lord, I'm free. No longer bound. No more
chains holding me. My soul is resting. It's just a blessing. Praise the
Lord, Hallelujah, I'm free."